Recommended By Curators

July 31

We've been working on these for quite a while and are happy to announce that Asteroids are now available to add to your systems in PA! They have been added in a few of the existing systems (including ranked), so keep your eyes open for the telltale Asteroid belts and enjoy a new way to annihilate planets!

This update also includes a ton of bugfixes, polish items, and AI tweaks for you to play against, as well as new feedback added to make placing buildings much easier!

Take a look at the full notes below, and we hope you all enjoy the new additions to the game!

June 9

We've been taking notes on the feedback we've been receiving on the forums both here and on the official Uber forums and have done a massive redesign to the Galactic War!

A few of the included in the changes:
- Tech Discovery Redesign
--You will now be able to choose one tech from a group of three when you explore a system.
--You will no longer be given techs that you already have as one of the three choices.
--You will now only be given techs that you can use--IE no bot buffs without the ability to build bots.
- Rebalanced chances to discover various techs
- Improved AI difficulty ramping
- Improved system difficulty ramping
- New and improved redesigned boss fights for all factions
- Galactic War now defaults to a system size of Medium instead of Epic
- You now have the option to toggle "Hardcore mode" on and off when starting a new war
--Losing a match in Hardcore Mode will end the active Galactic War, as it did in previous Galactic War iterations.
--Losing a match outside of Hardcore Mode will allow you to load a save from before moving into the hostile system.
- Galactic War now has two neutral stars that always spawn next to the starting point

We've also done a huge pass on pathfinding to fix the majority of reported cases of units getting stuck on buildings, as well as AI improvements and a bunch of bug fixes and polish items.

We are glad to finally be able to offer the improvements so many have been asking for, and hope you enjoy the rework on the single player portion of PA!

Blow up everything, anywhere; dominate with punishing spacecraft, robots, and other futuristic machines of war. Arm asteroids and send them on planet-destroying collision courses. And take over an entire galaxy in a dynamic single-player mode with procedurally generated content. Don’t just win, annihilate!

Key Features Include:

Epic Single-Player - Galactic War is a twist on traditional real-time strategy campaigns that has players battling across a dynamic galaxy filled with procedurally-generated content. Every playthrough is different. Annihilation is final.

Epic Multiplayer - Play with up to ten friends (or enemies) in massive free-for-all and team-based matches.

Spectate And Broadcast - Spectate matches with a suite of incredible viewing options or broadcast with integrated Twitch.TV support.

I've been playing this RTS since the initial alpha release, I've watched it steadily get better and better over time. If you enjoyed Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander this game captures a similar (note: similar, not identical) feel, but with a unique approch using spherical maps (you can have one or multiple planets)

The highlight of this game for me is playing with a group of friends in team games with shared armies. I played a good deal of SupCom / SupCom:FA with friends and while it was fun, it just didn't capture the same feeling of team cooperation that you can get from sharing a single set of units working with your friends. Shared armies lets you split up the management of the game by not forcing any one single person to keep track of everything (and in large games over multiple planets, this can be difficult) Tasks such as economy expansion, scouting and raiding, orbital and multi-planet expansion can be split among teammates. This does require a degree of cooperation as there is a single shared resource pool, but the benefits are well worth it.

I wanted so much to love this game. I'm a huge SupCom and TA fan, and this game looked like it was going to be the game that I was playing every day for the next couple of years. But after a while things were starting to look pretty bad, I came back online for the first time in a while to see if things have picked up. The game is still a very bland and repetetive experience. As an RTS all of the authentic strategy is in the first 5 minutes of each game, and then it's just who can push the most build capacity.

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is, in my opinion, the best RTS game ever made. It's basic mechanics are excellent, the need for map control, economy management, unit management, tech management and intel are all closely interdependent, meaning that you're always INVOLVED in the battlefield even during the "quiet" stretches of gameplay. The available maps are excellent, and if you play on Forged Alliance Forever, a community maintained lobby with a competetive 1v1 ladder and public match service for casual players, there are stacks more to download. The game was also beautiful, with a good spread of aesthetically and strategically unique factions from the bread and butter "space marines" UEF, the intel oriented guerillas Cybran, the overrun focussed Aeon, and the tech heavy Seraphim. The game progression from opening to endgame is multifaceted and calls for real-time responses to your opponenents activity. To this day after 5 years of playing Forged Alliance if anybody tells me they're looking to get into a new competetive game I tell them to get FA. Similar things can be said of Total Annihilation, PA's other direct predecessor.

PA takes the "massive-scale" RTS format, and turns the format into an (ironically) incredibly two-dimensional experience. The units are bland and there is no faction diversity, the game escalates quickly but when it gets to its peak it tends to degenerate into a massive drag, especially across multiple planets with player interaction at a minimum, with power plays limited to a very uninteresting blob vs blob. Defensive plays just don't mean much in this game after a point. Your point defence investments will be thrown out for the sake of producing ever more units in the ongoing drudgery that is the endless escalation in this game. It sounds and is pretty cool the first few times you play it, but then you have your 10th game, and you realise you're doing more or less the same thing you did in the last 9, except there's a lava planet in this system, cool! But aside from your units not being able to drive over lakes of lava, that means very little. it's just forced no mans land. Interplanetary warfare epitomizes this. Build lots of orbital defences, build lots of fighters and send them at your opponents defences, wait 5 minutes for the fleet to arrive, hope it works, maybe send some fabricators to teleport an army from your planet to that one. I've done it so many times and I just don't really want to any more.

Huge scope for escalation in an RTS is cool, but you can't build a game on sheer escalation, which is what this is. There is no nuance, deploying a small force well is almost never going to make a game-changing difference, to the point where it's not worth trying, better stick to what you know. The learning curve is too steep as it is to try subtle strategies as a new player, and once you get to grips with the game you realise that there is very little to be done outside of beating your opponent in an arms race.

The game was released unready, and is just generally a very poor execution of a great concept, centred around a gimmick which doesn't come into play that often. My one hope for the game is that some modders come along and take the good (but extremely temperamental) engine and inject some life into it, the elements are there, but Uber half ♥♥♥♥♥ it, and just made the most nondescript RTS they could, and then made it really big and really long... and really ♥♥♥♥ing boring.

**UpdateSince writing this review, some of the significant gameplay bugs have been fixed, although there are still many to be dealt with. The developer has shown their strong desire to continue patching them out, so for this reason i would now recommend the MULTIPLAYER experience.

If you are looking for a purely SINGLEPLAYER experience however, this is still a wary not recommend. The singleplayer is now definitely functional, alot less rng dependant, and you will more likely have the tools you need to deal with the situations you are put in. However, the underlying gameplay will still quickly grow repetitive. There is no compelling story, and the only difference from simply playing a normal AI battle is that you get cards which grant uninteresting number buffs. e.g. x% more income, build power, damage.

**Original review (please note, most of the bugs listed here have been resolved in patches since which I have marked with an asterix*)

9 months after release, PA is still a not recommend in my books. I love the game to death and will still continue to play it with the awesome community it has, but I just cannot in good conscience recommend it to others. The game suffers from a multitude of longstanding issues including

- Horrendous unit pathing*- Pages of unfixed bugs- Frequent crashes*- Basic functionality like attack move and unit target prioritisation doesn't work*- Undocumented ladder system- Lag and unresponsiveness issues throughout the menus and UI*- System designer is buggy beyond belief and the save button doesn't actually save anything.- Join game button frequently doesn't work*- Often serious lag issues when playing from AU to EU server and vice versa (you need to use the US server)*- Hardly any unit variety since tier 2 (50% of units) is horribly unviable- A terrible hotkey system design

This game is a very rough gem, and one of its main strengths is that there are talented modders in the community who put out fixes and other ease of use mods that you can get off the PA mod manager (another community tool). An absolute must have if you decide to get this game. Unfortunately, there is only so much you can fix with mods though.

This is a game you play more so because of the community than because of the game itself. So make friends, otherwise I don't think you'll have much fun

It's like Total Annihilation if it were made by Peter Molyneux - Unfinished, unoptimized, and far below everyone's expectations.

It's a resource hog.Planets are the size of marbles.The "galactic war" mode is really just a bunch of skirmishes where you have a handicap, nothing more.I could go on about the kickstarter rewards and how the game was like $90 on steam at some point, but to make a long story short this is just another crowd funded flop. I hate some of the decisions the bean-counters make sometimes too, but video game programmers have proven themselves to be completely incapable of time management and making rational business decisions. This game is just more evidence of the massive downsides to crowd-funded video games.

I've been a fan of TA since it's first rendition and this to me is a blemish I will pretend doesn't exist. Just play TA:FA if you want a good RTS with giant robots and massive weapons.

Not much to recommend it. The gameplay is very shallow, the Commander unit is the least interesting in the series (other than visually it is a basic worker with a better gun) and the spherical planets sound interesting but in practice make it hard to locate anything and make the units seem small and hard to distinguish. The seemingly unlimited units mean the AI is always at an advantage for controlling them, and it is a constant rush-fesh. Disappointing overall.